Mollusks have been on earth for hundreds of millions of years. We are at a point where the CO2 is at one of the lowest concentrations in earth's history. They seem to have survived a slightly lower pH before, so what reason is there to believe they won't again?

Scientists have shown how geologic process regulates the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Researchers have documented evidence suggesting that part of the reason that Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator -- the geologic cycles that churn up the planet's rocky surface.http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.../03/140319143904.htm

To investigate consequences of ocean acidification on marine systems, future ocean scenarios have been simulated with the KOSMOS mesocosms (KOSMOS: Kiel Off-Shore Mesocosms for future Ocean Simulations) at Raunefjord, Norway. These nine large floating structures, each of which isolates 75.000 litres of seawater, were brought to different carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as to be expected for upcoming decades and centuries. For one month, the surface of six mesocosms was sampled daily with a glass plate.http://m.phys.org/news/2014-11...evant-functions.html

VANCOUVER - Scientists have cracked the mystery of what has killed millions of sea stars in waters off the Pacific coast, from British Columbia to Mexico.

Microbiology Prof. Ian Hewson of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said the culprit is densovirus, commonly found in invertebrates.

He said the virus literally made what are commonly called star fish dissolve within two to 10 days after infection, leaving them in a pile of goo on the ocean floor.

Hewson is the lead author of a study along with Ben Miner of Western Washington University that was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He said the wasting disease hit about 18 months ago, at a time when the number of sea stars inexplicably exploded.

Most viruses in nature are common and help keep dominant species in check, but he said divers reported seeing mountains of sea stars in the ocean around the time mass mortalities started occurring.

"This very high number of sea stars in the Pacific Northwest leading up to this disease epidemic probably is what exacerbated the virus and made the switch between something relatively benign into something that was totally virulent," Hewson said.

"A diver was telling me they were diving in Howe Sound and all of a sudden these sea stars started to fall down around them and there was this huge avalanche underwater," Hewison said from Brisbane, Australia.

Fishermen also reported a dramatic increase in the number of sea stars.

"It was getting to the point where it was actually causing big economic losses for the fishers up there. Essentially, they couldn't catch crabs because their traps were just totally clogged with these sea stars and they were becoming quite irate."

When sea stars also started dying at the aquariums in Vancouver and Seattle from water that was piped into tanks from the ocean, the mystery deepened.

"The disease was capable of moving into their facilities through intake pipes and made it past filtration systems that would otherwise remove very large particles," Hewson said.

However, sea stars that were in water that was ultraviolet-light treated and sterilized survived.

Researchers then took museum samples of sea stars from British Columbia to Baja, Calif., collected as far back as 1942, the 1980s and 1991, Hewson said.

The smoking gun was that healthy sea stars became sick within seven to 10 days of being injected with the virus from diseased sea stars. The experiment was repeated by transferring the virus from the ill animals into healthy ones, with the same results.

"We detected two of the five genes that the virus has, which gives us confidence that this is the same virus," Hewson said.

The deaths of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of sea stars has left an abundance of sea urchins, which would have served as meals for their voracious predators.

"We had these areas which were once covered with sea stars and now they're covered with sea urchins."

That in turn has impacted giant kelp, the dining choice for sea urchins.

The number of sea stars has slowly started to recover in Oregon, and will take several years to return to normal along the Pacific coast, Hewson said.

"We are so new to this outbreak even a year on that we haven't had a chance to observe any of the long-term impact."

Dr. Martin Haulena, a veterinarian at the Vancouver Aquarium, one of the aquariums that offered samples for the study, said sunflower sea stars were affected very quickly by the virus that caused such huge die-offs that may be part of the normal boom-and-bust cycle of nature.

"There's been supposition that urchins would take over where sea stars used to be," he said, adding long-term monitoring will be needed to determine the impact of the virus.

Christmas has come a couple of days early for climate sceptics, in what may well prove to be one of the biggest blows to the Global Warming religion since Climategate.

This time the pillar of green faith which has been rudely dismantled by sceptical investigators is an alleged phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”

For years this has been touted by environmentalists as possibly the greatest threat to the planet after “global warming.”

According to Jane Lubchenko, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it is “climate change’s equally evil twin” because of the disastrous consequences it may have for everything from the navigational systems of spawning salmon to the health of coral reefs.

Ocean acidification is said to be caused when excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by the sea, reducing its pH levels to make it more acidic.

But, as Watts Up With That reports new evidence unearthed by an inquisitive graduate student suggests that “ocean acidification” may be a scientific fraud to rank with the great “man-made-global warming” scare.

At the centre of the scandal is NOAA, the US federal scientific agency which measures and researches changes in the oceans and atmosphere, and which maintains one of the temperature datasets used to measure “global warming.”

One of NOAA’s departments – the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) – also happens to be one of the mainstays of the alarmist narrative about “ocean acidification.”

A 2004 paper by two of PMEL’s senior oceanographers – Dr Richard Feely and Dr Christopher Sabine – is often cited in support of “ocean acidification” theory and is reproduced, in simplified form, at NOAA’s website. It also formed part of testimony that Feely gave to Congress in 2010, again to the effect that increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing a reduction in seawater pH.

It warns:

“The impacts of ocean acidification on shelled organisms and other animals could negatively affect marine food webs, and, when combined with other climatic changes, could substantially alter the number, variety, and health of ocean wildlife. As humans continue to send more and more carbon dioxide into the oceans, the impacts on marine ecosystems will be direct and profound.”

and:

“The message is clear: excessive carbon dioxide poses a threat to the health of our oceans.”

However, it now seems that the paper’s certainty is at best misplaced, at worst outright dishonest. Not unlike Michael Mann’s discredited Hockey Stick graph it appears to depend on cherry-picked data and misleading projections in defiance of real-world evidence.

The alleged fraud was uncovered by Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with nearly 30 years’ experience now working towards his PhD at the University of New Mexico. While studying a chart produced by Feely and Sabine, apparently showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels, Wallace noticed that some key information had been omitted.

Mysteriously, the chart only began in 1988. But Wallace knew for a fact that there were oceanic pH measurements dating back to at least 100 years earlier and was puzzled that this solid data had been ignored, in favour of computer modelled projections.

When Wallace emailed his query to Feely and Sabine, however, he found them less than helpful.

Sabine replied that it was inappropriate for Wallace to impugn the “motives or quality of our science” and warned that if he continued in this manner “you will not last long in your career.” Having provided Wallace with a few links – all of which turned out to be useless – he concluded his email by saying “I hope you will refrain from contacting me again.”

This response, again, calls to mind the behaviour of Michael Mann in response to queries from Steve McIntyre about where to find the raw data for his Hockey Stick. Mann was similarly obfuscatory, rude and dismissive.

Undeterred, Wallace eventually got hold of the instrumental records which Feely and Sabine had chosen to exclude from their graph of doom and plotted a time series chart of his own, covering the period from 1910 to the present.

His results were surprising. What they suggest is that global acidification is a figment of Feely’s and Sabine’s imagination: there has been NO reduction in oceanic pH levels in the last century.

Wallace says: “Oceanic acidification may seem like a minor issue to some but, besides being wrong, it is a crucial leg to the entire narrative of ‘human-influenced climate change’.”

He adds: “In whose professional world is it acceptable to omit the majority of the data and also not disclose the omission to any other soul or Congressional body?”

Captain, if your ship were to suddenly take on water and you could identify a clear leak in the hull (one the size that would explain the amount of incoming water) - wouldn't it be negligent to ignore that leak in favor of finding an unseen one?It's really not much different from predicting that a cup of vinegar added to a gallon of distilled water will drive the acidity of that water up by a given amount - adding the vinegar - and then observing that the acidity did, indeed, go up by the expected amount. The logical, and most parsimonious, explanation is that the added vinegar caused the rise in acidity. To conclude otherwise would require an explanation for 1) what unknown process(es) neutralized the added acidity of the vinegar and 2) what alternative, unseen constituent(s), alternatively, caused the observed rise in acidity.

Originally posted by SUB:Your source claims there has been no change in oceanic Ph in the last century~Pure bald faced denialism at its finest!Here's a graphic showing aragonite saturation change from 1880 to present:http://www.epa.gov/climatechan.../oceans/acidity.html

When carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, carbonic acid is formed. This leads to higher acidity, mainly near the surface, which has been proven to inhibit shell growth in marine animals and is suspected as a cause of reproductive disorders in some fish.

On the pH scale, which runs from 0 to 14, solutions with low numbers are considered acidic and those with higher numbers are basic. Seven is neutral. Over the past 300 million years, ocean pH has been slightly basic, averaging about 8.2. Today, it is around 8.1, a drop of 0.1 pH units, representing a 25-percent increase in acidity over the past two centuries.